- » ToastedRav.com
- » How-To
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| The Toast - 11.21.08 - PETA Attacks Lindsay Lohan and Will Smith Stops By! | Ask St. Louis: What's Your Favorite Pick-Up Line? | Giving It A One-Two Punch: A Boxing Lesson With Sweat Gym |
Updated 63 Days ago
Being Polite One Door At A Time
Recently I realized I have one of the rudest habits: up until a week or so ago I had never held the door for my coworkers when entering a room or building alongside them. Be it a man or a woman (see, my rudeness is equal opportunity) I waited for those accompanying me to get the door and breezed right through without a second thought. I am not sure where my habit came from, but when I realized I may be doing something wrong I began making a vested effort to correct it by grabbing the door when I am the first to reach it (now I am trying to be equal opportunity polite).
Moving around most office buildings raises the "who gets the door" etiquette question multiple times a day, and I have to think I am not a lone soul, lost in a sea of rudeness. In my research to find the "official" door etiquette rule, I discovered there is quite a controversy behind the door holding rules especially when gender is a factor. Some people strongly believe it is sexist for a man to hold the door at any time for a woman no matter if they are on a date or entering a conference room.
Dr. Beverly Langford, President of the business consulting, training, and coaching firm LMA Communications, wrote "The Etiquette Edge: The Unspoken Rules for Business Success." In her book, she poses the following multiple choice question (pg 13):
"When you approach a doorway at the same time as a person of the opposite sex, the following rules apply:
A) Whoever arrives first should open it and hold it for those who are following.
B) Men should open the doors for women.
C) Women should open doors for men to prove they are no longer oppressed.
D) Always open and hold the door for someone of either sex if that person has his or her hands full."
Dr. Langford gives a definite answer, but what do you, dear internets, think is the right answer?
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Of course there is also the convenient reciprocity where there is a door followed by another door as is typical in many restaurants. That way, if someone holds the door for you, you can instantly do the same for him or her.
Good for you, Melody, for doing the right thing.
My one pet peeve isn’t directly associated with door etiquette but it does have to do with the “Thank you” part. I was raised to say “Please,” “Thank You” and “You’re Welcome.” I don’t think that is old fashioned, I think its just common courtesy. Nothing drives me more nuts then when you Thank someone and they respond with a nonsensical “Mmmhmmm.”
Seriously, wth is that? You can’t be troubled to utter a simple polite response that most people offer unconsciously? All that is required is a simple “You’re welcome” or a “No problemo” or something. This ludicrous “Mmmhmmm” might as well be an F Bomb or a swift kick to the tender bits. Hey, you don’t even had to mean it, just at least extend some effort and go through the motions and create the illusion that you aren’t completely self centered and rude.
Wow, went off on a rant there. At least I didn’t go off on my grocery store pet peeve, which came up last night. I mean, why do people part their cars in the middle of the isle? Are they ignoring the probability that someone else on this planet might like to shop too? How hard is it to . . . see? There I go again. I’ll shut up now.
Your intuitive perception of the subtleties of the world around us helps us to question... and grow as people! A blog should inform, amuse &/or entertain; which you do stupendously. But it's rare that insight is extended in such a fashion that the writers charisma & inner honesty persuades us to examine our own behaviors & motivations. You achieve this height often; & so, I thank you!
We'll keep coming back... and perhaps even work a bit on our cart etiquette.
E. Open the door for old ladies every time. Only open the door for an old man if he has a walking stick. (Careful, sometimes they hit.)
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.